•  833
    Wittgenstein, Meta-Ethics and the Subject Matter of Moral Philosophy
    Ethical Perspectives 22 (1): 69-98. 2015.
    Several authors claim that, according to Wittgenstein, ethics has no particular subject matter and that, consequently, there is and can be no such thing as meta-ethics. These authors argue that, for Wittgenstein, a sentence’s belonging to ethics is a classification by use rather than by subject matter and that ethics is a pervasive dimension of life rather than a distinguishable region or strand of it. In this article, I will critically examine the reasons and arguments given for these claims. I…Read more
  •  463
    On Wittgenstein’s Comparison of Philosophical Methods to Therapies
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (4): 566-583. 2015.
    Wittgenstein’s comparison of philosophical methods to therapies has been interpreted in highly different ways. I identify the illness, the patient, the therapist and the ideal of health in Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods and answer four closely related questions concerning them that have often been wrongly answered by commentators. The results of this paper are, first, some answers to crucial questions: philosophers are not literally ill, patients of philosophical therapies are not always p…Read more
  •  433
    D. Justin Coates argues that, in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, P. F. Strawson develops a modest transcendental argument for the legitimacy of our moral responsibility practices. I disagree with Coates’ claim that Strawson’s argument provides a justification, in Wittgenstein’s and/or Strawson’s sense of that term, of our responsibility practices. I argue that my interpretation of Strawson solves some difficulties with Coates’ argument, while retaining its advantages.
  •  433
    Wittgenstein and Objectivity in Ethics: A Reply to Brandhorst
    Philosophical Investigations 40 (1): 40-63. 2016.
    In “Correspondence to Reality in Ethics”, Mario Brandhorst examines the view of ethics that Wittgenstein took in his later years. According to Brandhorst, Wittgenstein leaves room for truth and falsity, facts, correspondence and reality in ethics. Wittgenstein's target, argues Brandhorst, is objectivity. I argue that Brandhorst's arguments in favour of truth, facts, reality and correspondence in ethics invite similar arguments in favour of objectivity, that Brandhorst does not recognise this bec…Read more
  •  429
    Seeing Color, Seeing Emotion, Seeing Moral Value
    Journal of Value Inquiry 50 (3): 539-555. 2016.
    Defenders of moral perception have famously argued that seeing value is relevantly similar to seeing color. Some critics think, however, that the analogy between color-seeing and value-seeing breaks down in several crucial respects. Defenders of moral perception, these critics say, have not succeeded in providing examples of non-moral perception that are relevantly analogous to cases of moral perception. Therefore, it can be doubted whether there is such a thing as moral perception at all. I arg…Read more
  •  416
    The Facts and Practices of Moral Responsibility
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (3): 790-811. 2019.
    Strawsonians about moral responsibility often claim that our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, rather than the other way round. Many have argued that such ‘reversal’ claims have an unwelcome consequence: If our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, does this not imply, absurdly, that if we held severely mentally ill people responsible, they would be responsible? We provide a new Strawsonian answer to this que…Read more
  •  415
    Is Moral Responsibility Essentially Interpersonal? A Reply to Zimmerman
    The Journal of Ethics 21 (3): 309-333. 2017.
    According to Michael Zimmerman, no interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal captures a significant truth. He raises several worries about the Strawsonian view that moral responsibility consists in susceptibility to the reactive attitudes and claims that this view at best supports only an etiolated interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. He outlines three problems. First, the existence of self-reactive attitudes m…Read more
  •  405
    Cognitivists and non-cognitivists in contemporary meta-ethics tend to assume that moral judgments are semantically uniform. That is, they share the assumption that either all moral judgments express beliefs, or they all express non-beliefs. But what if some moral judgments express beliefs and others do not? Then moral judgments are not semantically uniform and the question “Cognitivist or non-cognitivist?” poses a false dilemma. I will question the assumption that moral judgments are semanticall…Read more
  •  393
    The aim of this article is twofold. First, I want to offer an introduction of and a comparison between three accounts of philistinism. Secondly, I show how the phenomenon of philistinism, a failure to speak for oneself, helps to develop an original perspective on Wittgenstein’s moral thought. It is often claimed that Wittgenstein’s personal ethics were quite unorthodox because he repeatedly seems to have supported destruction, war and slavery. I argue that, in the light of my discussion of phili…Read more
  •  380
    How Morality Can Be Absent from Moral Arguments
    Argumentation 30 (4): 443-463. 2015.
    What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments in the thin sense. If thes…Read more
  •  363
    Moral modesty, moral judgment and moral advice. A Wittgensteinian approach
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 75 (1): 20-37. 2014.
    Moral philosophy has traditionally aimed for correct or appropriate moral judgments. Consequently, when asked for moral advice, the moral philosopher first tries to develop a moral judgment and then informs the advisee. The focus is on what the advisee should do, not on whether any advice should be given. There may, however, be various kinds of reasons not to morally judge, to be ‘morally modest’. In the first part of this article, I give some reasons to be morally modest when moral advice is …Read more
  •  353
    A fundamental question in responsibility theory concerns the relation between being responsible and our practices of holding responsible. ‘Strawsonians’ often claim that being responsible is somehow a function of our practices of holding responsible, while others think that holding responsible depends on being responsible, and still others think of being and holding responsible as interdependent. Based on a Wittgensteinian reading of Strawson, I develop an account of the relation between being a…Read more
  •  349
    Do Moral Questions Ask for Answers?
    Philosophia 43 (1): 43-61. 2015.
    It is often assumed that moral questions ask for answers in the way other questions do. In this article, moral and non-moral versions of the question ‘Should I do x or y?’ are compared. While non-moral questions of that form typically ask for answers of the form ‘You should do x/y’, so-called ‘narrow answers’, moral questions often do not ask for such narrow answers. Rather, they ask for answers recognizing their delicacy, the need for a deeper understanding of the meaning of the alternatives an…Read more
  •  326
    Introduction to Wittgensteinian Approaches to Moral Philosophy
    Ethical Perspectives 22 (1): 1-14. 2015.
    Introduction to a special issue of the journal Ethical Perspectives (2015, 22/1) on Wittgenstein and moral philosophy.
  •  313
    I highlight three features of P.F. Strawson’s later, neglected work on freedom and responsibility. First, in response to a criticism by Rajendra Prasad, Strawson explicitly rejects an argument put forward in ‘Freedom and Resentment’ against the relevance of determinism to moral responsibility. Second, his remarkable acceptance of Prasad’s criticism motivates him to take the ‘straight path’, that is, to be straightforward about the relation between determinism, freedom, the ability to do otherwis…Read more
  •  302
    The idea that thought and language can be clarified through logical methods seems problematic because, while thought and language are not always exact, logic (by its very nature) must be. According to Kuusela, ideal (ILP, represented by Frege and Russell) and ordinary language philosophy (OLP, represented by Strawson) offer opposed solutions to this problem, and Wittgenstein combines the advantages of both. I argue that, given Kuusela’s characterisation of OLP, Strawson was not an OLP’er. I sugg…Read more
  •  301
    This article is an introduction to the metaphilosophical thought of the contemporary German philosopher Odo Marquard. He understands the philosopher’s competence as a competence in compensating for incompetence or, with a German neologism, as Inkompetenzkompensationskompetenz. I offer two interpretations of Marquard’s most famous notion. Both interpretations have been developed in order to answer a central question: if philosophers are incompetent, how can they live with their incompetence? The…Read more
  •  298
    Moral Responsibility and the Moral Community: Another Reply to Zimmerman
    The Journal of Ethics 22 (1): 77-92. 2018.
    Michael Zimmerman has recently argued against the twofold Strawsonian claim that there can be no moral responsibility without a moral community and that, as a result, moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. I offered a number of objections to Zimmerman’s view, to which Zimmerman responded. In this article, I respond to Zimmerman’s responses to my criticisms.
  •  297
    Addressed Blame and Hostility
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 18 (1): 111-119. 2020.
    Benjamin Bagley ('Properly Proleptic Blame', Ethics 127, July 2017) sets out a dilemma for addressed blame, that is, blame addressed to its targets as an implicit demand for recognition. The dilemma arises when we ask whether offenders would actually appreciate this demand, via a sound deliberative route from their existing motivations. If they would, their offense reflects a deliberative mistake. If they wouldn't, addressing them is futile, and blame's emotional engagement seems unwarranted. Ba…Read more
  •  277
    P. F. Strawson was neither an externalist nor an internalist about moral responsibility
    European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 199-214. 2021.
    Internalism about moral responsibility is the view that moral responsibility is determined primarily by an agent's mental states; externalism is the view that moral responsibility is determined primarily by an agent's overt behaviour and by circumstances external to the agent. In a series of papers, Michelle Ciurria has argued that most if not all current accounts of moral responsibility, including Strawsonian ones, are internalist. Ciurria defends externalism against these accounts, and she arg…Read more
  •  262
    Conceptuele analyse en niet-discursieve inhoud
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 109 (2): 199-203. 2017.
    Reactie op Martin Stokhof, 'Het einde van de filosofie? De uitdaging van het naturalisme vanuit een Wittgensteiniaans perspectief' (2017, Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 109/2, 171-198).
  •  240
    Michael Gill has argued that contemporary metaethics proceeds on the assumption that morality is uniform. I apply Gill’s diagnosis to the debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. I argue, on the basis of examples, that there is good reason to question the assumption that morality is semantically uniform. I describe the assumption as a symptom of what Wittgenstein has called the philosopher’s “craving for generality‘. I discuss several recent metaethical positions in which the question “Co…Read more
  •  235
    Free will and moral responsibility, reactive and objective attitudes
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 80 131-147. 2018.
    In this article, I discuss Gerbert Faure’s Vrije wil, moraal en het geslaagde leven (Free Will, Morality, and the Well-lived Life). I summarize and elucidate Faure’s argument. My criticisms are directed primarily at the first chapter of the book, in which Faure develops what he regards as a Strawsonian account of free will and moral responsibility. Faure denies that we have free will; I argue that Strawsonians should not deny this. Faure argues that, although we do not have free will, it is ofte…Read more
  •  231
    A Wittgensteinian Account of Free Will and Moral Responsibility
    In Cecilie Eriksen, Julia Hermann, Neil O'Hara & Nigel Pleasants (eds.), Philosophical perspectives on moral certainty, Routledge. pp. 132-155. 2022.
    In this chapter we deal with the challenge to the existence of free will and moral responsibility that is raised by the threat of determinism from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Our argument starts by briefly recapitulating Wittgenstein’s analysis of the practice of doubt in On Certainty. We subsequently turn to the problem of free will. We argue that the existence of free will is a basic certainty and that the thesis of determinism fails to cast doubt on it. We thereby make use of – but also tr…Read more
  •  188
    Surveyable Representations, the "Lecture on Ethics", and Moral Philosophy
    Nordic Wittgenstein Review 3 (2): 41-69. 2013.
    I argue that it is possible and useful for moral philosophy to provide surveyable representations of moral vocabulary. I proceed in four steps. First, I present two dominant interpretations of the concept “surveyable representation”. Second, I use these interpretations as a background against which I present my own interpretation. Third, I use my interpretation to support the claim that Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” counts as an example of a surveyable representation. I conclude that, since…Read more
  •  166
    Introduction
    In Oskari Kuusela & Benjamin De Mesel (eds.), Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein, Routledge. pp. 1-16. 2019.
    Introduction to our edited volume on Wittgensteinian ethics with papers by Oskari Kuusela, Edward Harcourt, Anne-Marie Christensen, Sabina Lovibond, Alexander Miller, Benjamin De Mesel, Cora Diamond, Lars Hertzberg, Jeremy Johnson, Craig Taylor, Alice Crary, Lynette Reid.
  •  140
    Introduction to P.F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy
    with Sybren Heyndels and Audun Bengtson
    In Sybren Heyndels, Audun Bengtson & Benjamin De Mesel (eds.), P.F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-14. 2024.
    This chapter contains an introduction by the editors of the volume P.F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy. First, the chapter describes Strawson’s life and gives a summary of his most important works, ranging from his early ‘On Referring’ to his latest book Analysis and Metaphysics. Secondly, it gives an overview of the contributions that appear in P.F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy. Lastly, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources is given. The aim of the chapter is to introd…Read more